Building trust with your customers is 101 marketing knowledge, and likely something you think about constantly when building a marketing plan. The way we build trust has evolved over the years, but in 2022 it’s time to make that a priority. Customers now expect a 360 experience from you.
What’s Your Brand’s Purpose?
It doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C, people want to align with your brand’s values. And even more so, we want to see you live them through your brand’s messaging, content, community, and employee treatment. Your brand’s values are now one of your best marketing tactics.
“A marketer absolutely has a role in defining the why, the why is the soul of the brand.”
Lisa Bowman, Global CEO of United Way
Now is a great time to review the ethos of your organization. What are your values? Don’t make them just some fluffy statement, but the walk-your-talk set of values that you and the team will live by.
Create Authentic Entertainment
It’s time to be a human. It’s no wonder that influencers are all the rage right now – word-of-mouth and peer review have always been the best marketing tactics. But what makes a successful influencer is one that engages and creates entertainment. Learn from this sector of the industry and do the same from your brand.
This means honing in on your brand’s personality, adjusting your tone of voice, and speaking like well, a person. This also means tapping into platforms like audio and video. Give your audience something to dance to. A question to answer. Something to ponder. When you hit on that level, you’ve achieved brand recognition.
In paid advertising, this translates into Native Advertising. This tactic isn’t really new, but we’re going to see this more frequently because this form of advertising is meant to blend into your environment. Add to it rather than really disrupt it. This means that getting to know your customers and what they really want to read, watch and listen to, will work in your favor.
Conversation and Response
Good or bad, social media has taught us that we can get responses and do business at any time of the day. We expect it now. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen the rise of automated messaging tools that allow us to be present, even if we’re catching a few z’s. The best examples of those tools are ones that have really learned about their audience and anticipated specific question flows that walk someone through an experience, without having a human on the other end.
This trend isn’t going away – and neither is that best practice. Beyond tools like Facebook messaging and chatbots though, anticipating the user’s journey can be incredibly helpful through marketing automation. This means that you need to understand your customer’s journey, what they expect along the way and enhance their experience beyond that initial need. If you haven’t yet, you’ll want to get a good CRM setup to gather that first-party data. More on this in the next article.
Personalization not Generalization
Take a look at your marketing now – how are you achieving the top three items above? Everyone has room for improvement, including us here at Bondfire. But that’s the beauty of marketing right? We can always get better at connecting with our audience, all it takes is learning a little bit more about them, first.